Chapter 12 #3
“That’s not superhuman strength,” he continues.
“That’s just what happens when adrenaline shuts off all the limiters your brain normally puts on your muscles.
Entities do the same thing. They’ll make a ninety-year-old woman they’re possessing punch through a brick wall.
They don’t care if she breaks every bone in her hand. ”
Even picturing it makes me wince. “Here I thought regular people were scary enough without supernatural performance-enhancing drugs.”
Griffin crosses to the corner where a treadmill sits against the wall, flipping a switch that makes the display light up.
“Point is, if you’re going up against something that can make a grandma into The Terminator, you need to handle more than just mall security.”
He steps onto the belt to adjust the settings, and I notice something about the way he’s standing that triggers a memory.
“Were you in the military?” I ask.
Griffin’s hands pause on the console, and he glances over at me. “I served two years as a combat engineer. How’d you know?”
“My dad was an Army Ranger.” I reach under my shirt and pull out Dad’s dog tags, letting them rest against my sternum where Griffin can see them. “You’ve got the same… I don’t know. You carry yourself the same way he did.”
It sounds stupid when I say it out loud, like I’m reaching for something that isn’t there, but it’s true.
Griffin has that same quality Dad had—right now, he’s positioned himself on the treadmill where he can see both me and the barn entrance.
Dad used to do that in restaurants, insisting on the seat facing the door.
Mom would tease him about it, call him paranoid, but he’d say ‘Old habits die hard.’ I didn’t understand what she meant until he was gone and I started noticing all the small ways he’d been watching out for us.
Griffin steps away from the treadmill, lifting his prosthetic exaggeratedly high to not snag it on the lip. “I heard what happened to your family. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want pity,” I say.
“Good. I’m not offering it,” he says. “We all got baggage. This is not a place you end up when nothing bad’s ever happened to you.”
I bite the inside of my cheek, debating. Then: “What happened to you?”
He crouches to pat the treadmill belt. “I’ll make you a deal. You run the entire distance without complaining, and maybe I’ll tell you.”
“What happens if I do complain?” I ask, trying to match his casual tone and failing.
“Then I’ll have to find other ways to keep your mouth busy,” he says.
“I wish I had something to throw at you right now,” I say.
I want to hate the flirting. I do. But there’s something disarming about the way he’s so easygoing, and he’s just so easy to talk to.
I climb onto the treadmill, gripping the handles as Griffin sets the speed. “Give me your worst.”
My legs give out the second I stumble off the belt, collapsing face down on the rubber mat.
This must be why Nico runs at 2 AM. When your body hurts this much, your brain doesn’t have the energy left over to do anything except focus on how sick you feel. I’d still rather drink my feelings than run from them, but I guess we all have our methods.
I guess Nico must not get sick after running because he runs all the time and is used to it, but it’s hard to imagine this ever not hurting.
I’ll get there. Dad used to say pain is information, and the information it’s giving me now is that I’m out of shape.
He told me this story from his second tour, when his Humvee flipped, and he had to crawl out on a dislocated shoulder to pull his buddy out of the wreck.
He said he pretended his arm was talking to him, but he chose not to listen.
Griffin stands over me. He’s not even panting from his own workout. Jerk.
“Are you going to tell me your baggage now?” I ask, still face-down on the mat.
“Nope,” he says.
I mutter a curse into the strong-smelling rubber.
“You did way too much complaining,” Griffin says.
I flip him the middle finger over my shoulder.
Once I’ve cleaned up, Donny gets me going on the not-as-physically-demanding portion of my job: reading.
“Consider it your crash course in everything we do here,” Donny says, and gives me a list handwritten on a piece of lined paper. “I do expect you to come to me with questions, or to Benjamin, as he is equally capable of answering them. Understanding the theory will keep you alive in the field.”
He shows me where to find each tome in the library. Each book is beautiful. Leatherbound with hand-stitched spines and binding that has been worn soft at the edges. Most of the books on the list are written by Donny himself, with a few research papers contributed by Benji.
I curl up in one of the wingback chairs with Bob on my lap, and turn on the green-shaded lamp to cast a yellow glow onto the first book: Donald Dellman’s Field Guide to Possessors and Other Spectral Entities.
I spend the rest of the day reading, only taking a break for lunch and to go for a walk with Bob outside so my brain has a chance to recharge. The book is dense but surprisingly readable.
By the time the sun has gone down and I get to the section on Possessors, my head feels full, but I can’t stop. Donny told me to read, so I’m going to read.
Damage to the host depends on the duration of possession. Possessions interrupted within the first week typically result in severe psychological trauma, but leave cognitive function largely intact.
Possessions lasting longer than two weeks can cause measurable changes to brain structure.
The altered neural pathways become permanent fixtures, changing the host’s personality, emotional regulation, and impulse control.
I’ve seen hosts emerge from long possessions with the emotional capacity of children, their prefrontal cortex essentially rewired by a consciousness that did not care what it was doing as long as it achieved its goal.
These men and women can’t remember who they were before the possession began.
Some become so afraid of their own minds that they withdraw, unable to trust their own thoughts or emotions.
Others turn violent even after the entity has been removed, because the entity’s rage is permanently encoded into their neural architecture.
Marcus Walsh would have woken up in a hospital bed, trying to piece together why there were so many bruises on his body or why there was a rope burn on his palms…
Is he going to go back to his normal life, his kids?
Is there any way to go back to normal after losing the part of yourself that you believed wasn’t capable of hurting another person?
Another question comes to me: if there’s a chance Marcus Walsh could turn violent again, should he be allowed to go free?
I immediately feel awful for even thinking it. He didn’t choose to have a ghost hijack his brain and turn him into a weapon. But what if he does turn violent on his own, just like the book said?
I press my palms against my eyes until spots bloom behind my lids, trying to push the questions away. They don’t budge.
My phone sits on the table next to me, and before I can talk myself out of it, I’m opening Facebook.
The app loads with its usual flood of notifications, but I ignore them and find Marcus Walsh on the third page of results.
His profile picture is a selfie of him with two kids, a boy and a girl, who can’t be older than elementary school age.
I scroll through his timeline. He hasn’t posted anything new in the past couple of days. But maybe he doesn’t post everything publicly.
My thumb hovers over the friend request button. What am I doing? But I tap it anyway, because maybe if he accepts, I can check in a couple of days and see if he’s posting again. That, maybe, he’s still him.
I’m going back to reading when a beeping sound blares through the house.
My hands fly to my ears, my heart immediately kicking into overdrive. The beeping is high-pitched and urgent, like an amplified digital alarm clock. Is this a fire alarm? Or—
Shit. Is it the ghost alarm? Did something get past the fence?
I set the book aside and push myself out of the chair, setting Bob on the ground as I pull open the library door.
The hallway is empty, but there’s a flurry of movement upstairs—doors opening, footsteps converging. The beeping stops just as Nico rounds the corner carrying a laptop, focused in that way that suggests he’s already three steps ahead of whatever’s happening.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“I called a team meeting,” he says as he walks past me.
A house-wide alarm is such an extra way to call everyone together for a meeting. I’m about to tell him this when he glances over his shoulder at me, his face stern and somber:
“I found a case, and it’s a big one.”